Protesting Too Much About Getty Images

When a business that is in the business of making money makes any move toward openness, I think of it as a pretty good thing, within the context of living in a society where everybody needs money to buy things like food and shelter.

So I embraced the news that Getty, whose images I have never used and probably never will – stop me in the corridor some time and ask me how I feel about stock images in anything – were going to be allowing embedding of a huge section of their catalogue, with forced attribution and links that benefit them.

I embraced it because to me, it’s a pretty good thing when a corporation or organisation works out a way to navigate through the cultural sense of entitlement users of the contemporary web have, without resorting to fear tactics, litigation, or DRM that breaks the content that we’re trying to use.

Anybody who has seen a movie legitimately in the last two decades has had to sit through a bunch of anti-piracy stuff. For several years buying music online often meant being quite limited in where you could use that stuff – a giant pain in the arse when you’d actually paid for it. And in the world of PC gaming, consumers have been dogged by games that were broken at point of sale by security.

Alongside this, people have been severely punished by the law for file-sharing, and apparently Getty themselves have “protected their ownership” of images with punitive litigation.

All of those methods are corporate ways of dealing with a cultural problem, and they don’t really help anyone. And all the while, the social internet has been moving further and further into the wild west of sharing stuff with abandon, and without attribution.

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To my mind, there are two major issues that producers or distributors of media – from publishers to libraries/educators to artists and everyone in-between – have to deal with: revenue and credit.

There’s a huge crossover between these two areas, but I think it’s fair to say that while businesses may care more about revenue, and individuals may care more about credit, anybody who creates or sells anything has an amount of concern that they split between those two things.

Litigation solves the first problem for many, but favours the organisations or individuals with money to spend on lawyers – an artist whose work has been stolen by Hot Topic is going to struggle to get any money back. Meanwhile, the second problem, of items shared without credit, is spreading like a pandemic. And it hits photography and illustration the hardest, because unlike music or video, ANYONE can share an image without attribution – you don’t have to be able to work editing software to do it. In fact, the way most images are presented online, it’s easier to share without attribution than with it.

This isn’t a great situation for artists and photographers, and photographers who are artists. If one is just a hobbyist who wants to share their work with others, removing them from the equation not only isn’t “fair”, it actually makes it impossible for them to benefit from the confidence boost or learning experience of knowing that their work is appreciated. If they’re sharing some of their work online in the hope of gaining potential paying clients, removing credit actually affects their livelihood.

But Facebook and Tumblr and Twitter make sharing images in this unthinking way incredibly easy, and the culture of ambient plagiarism spreads.

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Where the twin concerns of credit and commerce become inextricably linked, and the “harmless” behaviour of removing credit comes into sharp focus, is when corporate-minded people work out a way to exploit this shifting culture.

I think most people’s perception of how okay using other people’s work, without saying whose it is, shifts once huge amount of profits to individuals get involved. That’s when “fair use” becomes exploitation, as has happened with the wildly popular cluster of image-sharing accounts agglomerating around the @HistoryInPics model.

(Worth noting that since the article I just linked to came out, but possibly not because of it, the account seems to be adding photographer credits to more of their images. There’s also a small but growing sub-culture of people correcting or adding attribution where it’s lacking on these accounts – @PicPedant is one of the more prominent ones, but has fewer than ten thousand followers.)

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In our office, as in most areas of eLearning, and in education, discussion of Getty’s course-correction has been gently contentious and somewhat binary. Early discussions centred around whether Getty was now “as good as” a resource as Creative Commons. More recently, there’s been reminiscing about Getty’s past heavy-handedness when dealing with illegal use of their images.

This blog-post got shared around today, by Phil Bradley: “The Trojan Horse of Getty ‘Free’ Images“, and it seems to confirm a lot of biases. Bradley links on to a post by Karen Blakeman: “Getty Images is NOT Making All Of It’s Photos Freely Available“. Both are pretty anti Getty, and suggestive of conspiracy or hidden motives – although Blakeman seems rightly more agitated about misinformation that people across her social networks are spreading than by Getty themselves, and seems more interested in directing people to their T&Cs, which is always worthwhile.

But among all the scare-quotes and innuendo and obverse discussion, one huge point seems to have been missed, and that’s that Getty aren’t trying to solve the problem that everyone has decided they’re supposed to be solving.

“Getty Images is leading the way in creating a more visual world. Our new embed feature makes it easy, legal, and free for anybody to share our images on websites, blogs, and social media platforms.”

Most discussion I’ve seen seems to be around how one interprets the word “free” – I tend to take it as meaning “one doesn’t have to pay”, personally – but the pertinent part is “easy, legal”.

(Blakeman complains that people are saying that “all” of Getty’s images are available, and she’s right, because it’s inaccurate, but as an opening gesture I’m going to allow that 35 million images shows a level of conviction that I’m not going to chastise Getty themselves for.)

“What we’re trying to do is take a behaviour that already exists and enable it legally, then try to get some benefits back to the photographer primarily through attribution and linkage”

While people with bad memories of the company believe that Getty is just looking for a way of conning you into using their content, so that they can sue you for it later, it seems way more like Getty have worked out that litigation is expensive, and isn’t as good a revenue stream as their competitors over at YouTube and elsewhere are using.

“people were stealing imagery because they didn’t have an alternative. Our job here is to provide a better alternative to stealing, not only one that’s legal but one that’s better.”

They aren’t being shy about how they might exploit it later, either. That advertising Trojan Horse Bradley mentioned?

Craig Peters to CNET Australia again:

“Over time there are other monetisation options we can look at… That could be data options, advertising options. If you look at what YouTube has done with their embed capabilities, they are serving ads in conjunction with those videos that are served around the internet.”

I don’t like the advertising model of capitalism that we’re using at the moment (it seems inefficient to me) but – and maybe this is just my weird Greek pride at play – I think a Trojan Horse is something different.

I probably don’t need to unpick this too much, because they haven’t been circuitous about what this move may hope to achieve. People are already stealing their images, and sharing the work of artists and photographers who Getty is supposed to be representing without attribution. And people still will do that, and Getty will probably still end up suing some of those people.

But this move may in some way separate the power-user imagery-gankers from the people just trying to share nice pictures on Facebook, who maybe didn’t realise they were being jerks, and now have the option not to be.

I’d way rather see attributed links to the rights-holders on images than to ropey uncredited Buzzfeed articles.

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Like I’ve said already, I’m not a fan of stock images, and I’m not likely to be a customer of Getty, although it is nice to have the option, now, should I need it.

Phil Bradley apparently does, though. A preoccupation of his piece – one that I’ve seen echoed elsewhere – is that this new scheme doesn’t allow for embedding of images in Powerpoint presentations. You can still purchase the images and use them wherever you want, I believe, but the free service doesn’t allow for it.

This seems to make sense to me, because Powerpoint presentations is outside the scope of who Getty wants to service here. The question I’d ask is “what were you doing before?” There seems to be a lot of uncertainty about what counts as commercial use, which is the one thing Getty seem really not to want – if people are using Getty images in any way relating to commerce, Getty want their cut.

But I don’t see this as so confusing: if you are using images in an area that generates revenue, directly or indirectly, or helps you professionally, it seems obvious to me that that constitutes commercial use. If you’re using the work of others to illustrate work that benefits you, then their desired rights in that case should be satisfied.

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The passage that’s stuck with me the most in Bradley’s post is the one that states that for “the photographer it’s a disaster”. It’s a paragraph that makes a lot of assertions based on assumptions of what photographers who have signed up to Getty might want, but it’s problematic for me because I don’t know how the writer has been using images up until this point. The paragraph pings about quite a bit:

“If you have licensed Getty to use your images, this isn’t something that you can opt out from.” He says, although I don’t know the veracity of that… as Blakeman complains, not all of Getty’s catalogue is available, so it’s possible that different photographers have different deals with them?

“Unless you choose to pull your images.” He continues. Which sounds like being able to opt out to me.

“There are plenty of photographers who are not going to be keen on their material being shared left right and centre with no ability to say no.” My natural tendency toward facetiousness wants to point out that this is apparently already happening, without the photographer’s credit attached, and arguably one of the reasons for most photographers signing up to Getty in the first place is that the organisation will police your copyrights for you, in a way that is mutually beneficial to the photographer and Getty. By allowing the internet to run roughshod over their clients’ attribution before, Getty were actually letting photographers down.

At the end, we get to what I feel is the real point in this argument: “I can see images that you have embedded disappearing as they get pulled, which isn’t going to look very impressive”. This is if you’re using the free, embedded images, by the way – not if you’ve bought the use of the image.

So in the end, a paragraph about photographers’ rights comes down to an example of the rights of the people wanting to use the images for free. There’s a lot of conjecture about what constitutes “editorial purposes”, and whether or not Getty will pull images for arbitrary reasons as well, but it all seems to boil down to “will they pull this free provision at some point, and make me look bad?”

And I don’t want to pull Bradley apart on this, because really all he’s doing here is voicing what’s become a common acceptance on the social internet that images belong to everyone.

But it isn’t Getty’s job to enable our sense of entitlement. We aren’t Getty’s clients – that will always be the photographers and the paying customers. This is just a bone they’re throwing us because we were taking it anyway, and maybe if they make it easy enough for us to become paying customers down the line, it’ll be easier for them than having to sue every damn one of us.

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Education throws a cat among the pigeon of commercial use, and despite it being my field I don’t want to talk about it too much, beyond pointing out that, despite widespread practice to the contrary, attribution and legal use of imagery in teaching and studying is already supposed to be hugely important. Academics using content that doesn’t belong to them and that they don’t have authority to use can lead to disgrace or disciplinary, and students who do so without following attribution guidelines aren’t supposed to graduate.

As eLearning people, or technologists, promoting digital literacy among our colleagues and cohorts is our bread and butter. We should already be educating users in the implications of non-attribution, and encouraging them to make smart critical decisions about which resources they can use in their work.

That means telling them about Creative Commons repositories, and public domain images, but now I think it also has to include Getty. Trying to hide a resource like that away doesn’t stop people using it, it just allows them to drastically misuse it.

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In closing, I should point out that I’m not so naive to think that an organisation like Getty are somehow sweet, socialist angels, or that they haven’t been too hard on hapless users in the past, or that they treat content creators fairly. I’m sure they are totally evil. Down with the man, and all that.

But none of those things play into why I think this gesture of theirs is important. This is potentially a huge thing, in as much as it subverts the way we currently think of attribution, ownership and licensing of creative works. From a purely capitalist perspective, when a huge media organisation works out that it might make more money by giving a little for free, and not treating consumers like criminals by default, that’s massive. Flickr, before they were swallowed up by Yahoo, made similar realisations, and without them most of us would never have heard of Creative Commons.

Maybe we’d prefer that everything belonged to everybody, but we shouldn’t always be so ready to let perfect be the enemy of good. As technologists, we should try to be as pragmatic and agnostic about tech as possible.

Yes I know I’m useless at this myself, but I’m trying, and that’s all that matters, right?

“This is potentially a huge thing, in as much as it subverts the way we currently think of attribution, ownership and licensing of creative works. From a purely capitalist perspective, when a huge media organisation works out that it might make more money by giving a little for free, and not treating consumers like criminals by default, that’s massive.”

Not sure I understand how Getty letting you embed some of its images in websites/social media for free (in David Wiley’s words “You can look but you can’t touch”) subverts our understanding of property ownership of creative works? In fact what Creative Commons licensed images force you to do if you use/re-use/repurpose them is to think about the creator of the image and what s/he intended you to do with it. And of course it potentially subverts the consumer/producer relation in so much as it actively encourages repurposing/remixing (whether this happens much in practice is open to debate). I’m not sure people using these Getty images will be thinking too much about the capitalist property relation inherent in creative works to be fair.
With my learning technologist hat on of course I’ll be recommending these Getty images as one way to get correctly attributed high quality free images into course materials and social media with the important proviso regarding what might happen if/when Getty decide to flick the ads switch (Moodle course pages full of ads anyone?). But there are better alternatives out there – not perfect but still better – and its a shame that in Open Education week it is Getty’s ‘benevolence’ that has grabbed the headlines.

I think I may have covered the questions you raise in the post, but you know, if it takes someone over two thousand words to make what they think is a simple point, it’s possible that either the point isn’t that simple, or they didn’t do a very good job of it!

When I say “we”, I’m not talking about people like you or I who clearly already burn a lot of cycles thinking about this stuff, I’m talking about “we” as a culture that habitually, and increasingly, misuses and abuses the rights of copyright holders, be they covered by Creative Commons licenses or part of a curated commercial database like Getty’s.

From that perspective, I continue to think it is hugely subversive and progressive culturally when a commercial body makes ANY steps away from policing-by-litigation and toward free-to-use-with-caveats. Far MORE progressive for a company to embrace that model of capitalism than a sub-culture that has always believed in free sharing simply expanding their efforts in that area.

(I note now that that’s just an expansion of what I said in the bit you quoted, so I may be missing something.)

Further, and I don’t know this for definite so would love to know if there’s research out there, I believe Getty images, and Getty as an entity, probably have broader and deeper cultural penetration than Creative Commons – that is to say that while there are many more resources available under CC, a larger proportion of the general public, or people who source images in a casual way (for their blog, or presentations, say) have probably seen the Getty name on images to the extent that they’re aware of them, or seen Getty images stripped of credit, than images covered by CC.

(That ratio probably changes significantly among creative communities, but also might skew away from CC to Getty once you consider cultural cachet per image or on average. I don’t know, and wouldn’t know how to do the maths – if I did, I’d probably be, I don’t know, a famous maths guy, making loads of money from doing… number stuff… and this blog wouldn’t see me for dust.)

Put in an overly simplistic way that mixes metaphors – it’s WAY more subversive of culture at large when a giant leopard learns a new way of hunting humans than it is when a quiet majority/minority? keeps preaching to the choir. To get new people in the choir, you need to first tell them that it exists, and why a choir might not be as lame as they think it is, and tell them where it is, but people are already pretty invested in not being eaten by a giant leopard.

A major point in my post that may also have been obscured by the amount of words in it – it isn’t me taking a stand FOR Getty – putting MY web-person hat on I’ll still be anti-arbitrary stock-image use, whatever the source, til I die (or change my mind) – but ANTI the reduction or simplification of this story to obverse politics…

So, where people pit Getty and Creative Commons in a fight to the death from which only one moral victor will emerge, I reiterate that they aren’t even in competition – not remotely comparable, except that both do pictures. One is an ideological model, the other is a huge corporation operating within a DIFFERENT ideological model. Getty and Creative Commons each set out to solve totally different problems, for totally different people.

Of course, to the end user these two entities do intersect, but really when we tell people to choose between the two, what we’re doing is asking them to choose between the concept of curated and commercial resource libraries that you have to pay for unlimited use of, or an open and largely un-curated free-for-all. This isn’t a bad thing to suggest people think about, but it isn’t about Getty, it’s about two different ideologies and about convenience – Getty have just ended up being the face of it because they did this with their paid content before the other stock image peddlers.

If your users don’t need to benefit from that curation, or can be trusted to make good choices and properly apply manual credit, Creative Commons or public domain options are fine for them. If they might benefit from the curation and unambiguity of the license they get from stock image companies, Getty have made themselves pretty attractive for those guys.

(The nearest analogue I can think of is making the choice between finding tutorials in the wild-west of YouTube, or going with a curated provider like Lynda.com. A search for “photoshop tutorials” on YouTube is probably going to have a similar hit-rate to a search for “Easter Eggs” on a Creative Commons repository. In theory, your odds of finding a coherent tutorial, or an in-focus image, get significantly better going with Lynda or Getty.)

My piece also takes a stance against the language/stance of conspiracy, which continues this “us and them” paradigm, used in responses like the ones I refer to. Any suggestion that Getty will be trying to sneakily slip advertising in, for example, looks a bit weird when Getty themselves have openly said advertising is something they’re considering. What Bradley does by doing that is a little disingenuous, and actually more slippery and less transparent than what the evil corporation is apparently doing.

Again, I’m not taking an ideological stance against people arguing against corporations, but I am pushing back against indirect and mealy-mouthed discourse. In such an aggressive post, had Bradley taken ownership at any point of what his previous cultural appropriation behaviours are, I’d be way happier with it, but as it is, that has to all stay in subtext. If he isn’t using “appropriated” Getty images already, his dismay at not being able to use them the way he wants to in the future seems odd.

Your use of the word “benevolence” isn’t quite the same thing as the tin-foil-hat stuff I’m referring to, but does warrant a response – in their on-site bumph, Getty follow the standard, boring rules of marketing of putting a positive spin on it, but in the interview I linked to they made it pretty clear that this was as much a pragmatic move to better protect their – already compromised by the public – copyrights as it was a service to the public. Neither they nor I ever suggested any benevolence, although you may be responding to the other side of the coin of the knee-jerk negativity that I wrote this piece as a response to.

(For a move and a company that exists in the wider culture, whose greater concerns are probably the vast amounts of money pop-cultural sites like Buzzfeed or social accounts that I mentioned are making illegally off their curated content, I’m not sure Open Education week will even have been in Getty’s field of vision.)